Following suit, Mozilla has recently announced that will phase out support for NPAPI in Firefox, giving developers some time to port their plug-ins until the end of 2016. Benjamin Smedberg, Manager of Firefox Quality Engineering at Mozilla, said in a blog post that, indeed, plug-ins have become a “source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users” and “site maintainers should prepare for plugins to stop working in all versions of Firefox by the end of 2016.” He considers that this move is possible now because much of the functionality which was previously available only through plug-ins has been included in the browser. He also added that the upcoming Firefox 64-bit for Windows will not support plug-ins.

One exception will be Flash, Mozilla deciding to continue supporting it because “Flash is still a common part of the Web experience for most users.” But Unity, Java, Silverlight, Adobe Acrobat will have to go. And some developers have complained that their products need access to native APIs. Smedberg recommended to either switch to a pure native application, recompile the plug-in to asm.js or Webassembly, or re-write them to use the new web APIs available in Firefox. He also mentioned that Mozilla will continue to “prioritize features that will make it possible for sites to switch away from plugins.”

The only major browser we do not know what will do about NPAPI is Safari. It is quite likely Apple will move away from it especially now that Mozilla has decided to stop supporting it.

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